Google ChromeOS and Jolicloud

As some of you may already know, Google created quite a stir more than a year ago now when they spoke of creating their own operating system which would boot in seconds and connect directly to the Internet. We were supposed to have it available in time for Christmas, but that did not happen. What did happen, perhaps to test out the concept a bit, iron out the rough edges, get a bit of press out about it, and possibly forge some deals with major hardware providers and Internet carriers, Google instead decided to create a pilot project of about 60,000 Cr-48 custom built 12.1" notebook systems containing a special keyboard with different kinds of function keys suitable to a Web based system, a nice keyboard feel, a relatively small, but bright 12.1" display, a SSD - solid state disk that provides that amazing ten second boot time and one second sleep recovery time, and finally, a wireless only network that can connect to Wifi through a wireless router or to a Verizon 3G wireless network. They even provide 100 MB/month of free access to the VZW 3G network - not a lot, but certainly enough to sample the technology and run remotely when Wifi kiosks are not available.

I've been having some problems with my own wireless router, but I seem to finally have the thing operating at least at an acceptable level. Don't know what magic, other than changing the DNS provider - interestingly enough, to Verizon - 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2, which are performing well.

One added trick is to use this setup with the Jolicloud login page. To me, Jolicloud has more services referenced. Since you can use it without some kind of special hardware or running the Jolicloud OS (I have installed Jolicloud elsewhere), I can use the best of both worlds, connecting to Jolicloud - if I want to do so, to gain one click access to a huge variety of social networking and other cloud based services. Nice combo, ChromeOS and Jolicloud.

Nice device, nice pilot project; I like the Cr-48 very much.